The mother of Simpsons creator Matt Groening passed away recently. This is sad, and I do not intend to make light of it. Writing about famous people all day — especially online, from the comfort of your living room — can make it easy to forget that they’re also bags of skin that are filled with bones and muscles and feelings, and that they do not exist purely to provide us with things to discuss and/or yell about. So, yeah, first and foremost, condolences to the Groening family. Let’s not skip over that part.

The reason I bring all this up is because her obituary, which ran in her local Portland, Oregon newspaper, highlights just how much her son used his own life to develop one of the greatest television shows of all-time. The names really jump out at you once you know to look for them, especially her maiden name: Wiggum. I imagine Matt’s decision to use his mother’s family name for an inept, overweight police chief and his crayon-eating son may have led to some, uh … interesting conversations at one point or another.

The Simpsons was a something he sketched up moments before going into a pitch meeting because he decided at the last minute that he didn’t want to lose any rights to his “Life in Hell” comic strip characters